2011–the year that nothing went according to the plans

Again this is the time of year for summarizing the passing year and making plans for the next one.

Businesswise nothing went according to plan in 2011, some things went worse than the plan and some things were way better.

The bad parts are mostly traced to several months I was so swamped with other work I had nearly no time to work on my products, here are the 2011 plans and how they turned out:

• yaTimer time tracking software was supposed to have a major upgrade – in reality it had many releases over the year but they were small and didn’t include most of the new features I wanted.
• yaTimer Central Team and Sync tools for yaTimer was just released, it works but the graphic design of the web site and the application isn’t as good as I liked it to be – I didn’t have time to fix this.
• Squirrel Clock employee time and attendance tracking was supposed to be released in January - it was released (3 months too late) and isn’t selling very well due to the fact I didn’t have the time to promote it.
• The yaTimer Newsletter missed a few months and completely changed direction mid year.
• The blog had only one or two posts most months
• And the undisclosed future product mentioned in the plans for 2011 blog post was disclosed to be an anti-procrastination tool but it’s still at an early prototype stage (no progress on the anti-procrastination tool - funny).

But there were also some very good unplanned things that happened this year:

• Most important, I’ve stopped doing the project work that took all of my time, I’m now working only on the products
• Giraffe Upload photo backup was released this is a completely unplanned product that was born out of my need to safely backup my family pictures.
• Giraffe Upload Pro upload tool for pro photographers was also released, this is an extension to Giraffe Upload that let you do interesting things like shoot directly to the internet.
• Useful Photo Tips – my photography blog – was lunched (hey, I’m allowed to have hobbies)
• And a new program, a combination scheduling and invoice tracking tool is in the last stages of development and will be released soon.

I’m still working on the plans for 2012 so you can expect another blog post soon about what’s going to happen in the next year.

I hope you had a great 2011 and I wish you a wonderful 2012